The Senate will shortly consider an amendment by Senator John McCain to the annual defense authorization bill that would authorize adding about $18 billion to defense funding, using the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account as his mechanism. Doing so would exceed the defense level of last year’s Bipartisan Budget Act (BBA) and violate the “parity” principle that the President and...

The House Appropriations Committee is considering today a 2017 defense appropriations bill that would take a big step towards boosting defense spending above the limit in last year’s bipartisan budget agreement.

To do so, the bill shifts almost $16 billion to the core defense budget from overseas contingency operations (OCO) funds, creating an OCO hole that a supplemental appropriations...

As part of ongoing Republican efforts to balance the budget by spending cuts alone (and only in non-defense programs), the House budget would impose huge new cuts to non-defense discretionary spending after 2017 — cuts that would take that spending category far below even the historically low levels set by the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA), as further reduced by sequestration.

The House Republican budget calls for considerably more defense funding than last year’s budget agreement allows, funneling extra funds through “overseas contingency operations” (OCO) in a classic gimmick. This move, however, threatens more painful cuts in non-defense appropriations for 2017.

First, some background. Last year’s agreement included $74 billion in 2017 for OCO, which is...

Some conservatives are urging the House to cut $30 billion more from non-defense appropriations next year in an upcoming budget resolution. As we’ve explained, their justification — that policymakers didn’t pay for the...

The Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education will reportedly receive a disproportionately small share of the recent White House-congressional budget deal’s boost in overall non-defense funding — even though they include many high-...